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Angels Take Advantage of Yankees’ Pitching to Get New Life

Torii Hunter and the Angels are still alive in the ALCS after rallying past the Yankees in Game 5.

It would have been understandable if the Los Angeles Angels had packed it in for the season after seeing the New York Yankees turn a 4-0 deficit into a 6-4 lead in the top of the seventh inning Thursday night in Anaheim. The mammoth uprising had silenced the Angels fans among the crowd of 45,113 that included a sizeable number of Yankee supporters. But the Angels are alive after staging a three-run rally in the bottom of the seventh to send the American League Championship Series back to New York for Game 6 on Saturday night. It wasn’t easy, especially when the Yanks loaded the bases in the ninth before reliever Brian Fuentes retired Nick Swisher on a pop-up.

Of course, the odds still favor the Yanks, who still have two chances to win one game. But if they squander what would be their 40th AL pennant, much of the blame will focus on manager Joe Girardi for not replacing pitcher A.J. Burnett, who, after a long wait during the Yankee charge, promptly came out and allowed the first two batters to reach base.

“The Yankees were nine outs away from the Phillies and the World Series,” Joel Sherman laments in the New York Post. “Girardi could have gone for the kill. He could have tried to use his best two relievers, Phil Hughes and Mariano Rivera, to tag-team the final nine outs. Instead, he sent Burnett back out.”

“A.J. Burnett was at his dazzling best Thursday night as long as he was losing by four runs,” John Harper writes in the New York Daily News. “When it really mattered, however, he didn’t look at all like the guy the Yankees saw as a big-game pitcher when they gambled $82.5 million on him last winter.”

The Angels’ comeback was somewhat out of character, though. “Since the end of the division series, actually for several years with the exception of this year’s division series, the Angels could be counted on to play their worst baseball right around this time,” Yahoo Sports’s Tim Brown writes. “Then they finally beat the Boston Red Sox and couldn’t believe they were collapsing at the feet of the Yankees, down 3-1 in the ALCS like they didn’t even belong, like the stage was too big. As it is, they bought themselves another 48 hours or so.”

Nothing against the Angels, but the Tampa Tribune’s Joe Henderson wants a New York-Philadelphia World Series. Henderson dislikes baseball’s postseason schedule so much he’d love to see weather wreak havoc on the Fall Classic. You guessed it. He’s still bitter about last year’s rainy and cold Game 5 of the World Series in Philadelphia.

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There’s a big football match in London on Sunday, but it’s not the game at Wembley Stadium that’s the talk of the town. There’s no buzz surrounding the NFL’s effort to bring (American) football to the masses despite the New England-Tampa Bay game selling out quickly. Sure, the Patriots are 4-2 and have wide appeal because of quarterback Tom Brady, but the Buccaneers are woeful and winless at 0-6. It was impossible to find a story in the major British papers about the game, probably because the Bucs weren’t arriving until Friday. As if the Brits wanted to read about an NFL also-ran anyway.

It’s a Premier League match that will draw the most eyeballs Sunday: Manchester United versus Liverpool from Anfield. But the Reds are poised to have their first five-game losing streak in 22 years should they fall to United, the Independent’s Ian Herbert writes.

Patriots owner Robert Kraft was interested in buying a stake in Liverpool but was scared off by the lack of a salary cap in the Premier League, the Telegraph’s Oliver Brown reports.

Back to American football. In the St. Petersburg Times, Gary Shelton doesn’t see much hope for the Bucs, who have lost 10 straight going back to last season. “So let me get this straight: The English give us Dickens, and we give them a team that keeps getting the dickens beat out of it,” he grouses.

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Duke hasn’t won a national basketball championship since 2001 or been to a Final Four since 2004. That’s unacceptable for an elite program that’s the envy of many schools, and especially when hated ACC rival North Carolina has won twice in five years. But things might be turning around for coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Blue Devils, Yahoo Sports’s Dan Wetzel writes, thanks to a strong recruiting class that includes forward Kyrie Irving.

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Most athletes wait until they’re retired before revealing that they’re gay, fearing ostracism from teammates, crude taunts from fans, and perhaps losing their earning power. But not Donal Og Cusack. The hurling goalie this week announced that he’s gay, a decision that will make him a trailblazer in Irish sports, the Independent’s Martin Breheny writes.

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To get the full story of a sporting event, fans devour box scores and scour newspapers and web sites to get different perspectives on the game. Increasingly, fans can watch news conferences or hear athletes’ opinions over stadium loudspeakers. Not that athletes or coaches are always happy to comply, the Observer Sport Monthly’s Gary Imlach writes.

– Tip of the Fix cap to reader Don Hartline.

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